768 RAZORBILL 



Sea to Guatemala if not to Honduras, but is said hardly to be 

 found of late years in the eastern part of the United States. In 

 Africa its place is taken by three allied but well-differentiated 

 species, two of which (Corvus umbrinus, readily distinguished by its 

 brown neck, and C. affinis} having its superior nasal bristles up- 

 turned vertically) also occur in South- Western Asia, while the 

 third (C. leptonyx or G. tingitanus, a smaller species characterized by 

 several slight differences) inhabits Barbary and the Atlantic 

 Islands. Further to the southward in the Ethiopian Eegion three 

 more species appear, whose plumage is varied with white — C. 

 scapulatus, C. albicoUis and C. crassirostris — the first two of small 

 size, but the last rivalling the real Raven in that respect. 



RAZOEBILL or Eazor-billed Auk, known also on many 

 parts of the British coasts as the Marrot, Murre, Scout, Tinker, or 

 Willock — names which it, however, shares with the Guillemot, 

 and to some extent with the Puffin — a common sea-bird of the 

 Northern Atlantic,^ but not having a very high northern range, 

 resorting in vast numbers to certain stations on rocky cliffs for the 

 purpose of breeding, and, its object being accomplished, returning 

 to deeper waters for the rest of the year. It is the Alca tarda of 

 Linnaeus ^ and most modern authors, congeneric with the Gare- 

 FOWL, if not the true Guillemots, between which two forms it is 

 intermediate — differing from the former in its small size and in 

 retaining the power of flight, which that had lost, and from the 

 latter in its peculiarly-shaped bill, Avhich is vei'tically enlarged, 

 compressed and deeply furrowed, as well as in its elongated, 

 wedge-shaped tail. A fine white line, running on each side from 

 the base of the culmen to the eye, is in the adult bird in breeding- 



the name of Corvus caniivorus, C. cacolotl or C. principalis, of which there are 

 several forms, and the myology of one, the Mexican C. sinuatus, is the subject 

 of a volume by Dr. Shufeldt published in New York and London in 1890. 



^ Dr. Sharpe {Cat. B. Brit. MuS. iii. p. 45) separates C. affinis as form- 

 ing a distinct genus Bhinocorax ; but it is a hard task on any reasonable 

 ground to break up the genus Corvus as long accepted by systematists. 



^ Schlegel {Mus. des Bays-Bas, Urinatores, p. 14) records an example from 

 Japan ; but this must be an error. 



^ The word Alca is simply the Latinized form of this bu-d's common Teutonic 

 name, Alke, with which Auk is the English cognate term. It must therefore 

 be held to be the type of the Linnoean genus Alca, though some systematists 

 on indefensible grounds have removed it thence, making it the sole member of 

 a genus named by Leach, after Aldrovandus {Ornithologia, bk. xix. chap, xlix.), 

 Utainania — an extraordinary word, that seems to have originated in some 

 mistake from the equally mistaken Vuttwmaria, given by Belon {Observatio7is, 

 livr. i. ch. xi. (as the Cretan name of some diving bird (which certainly could 

 not have been the present species) and, as Mr. H. F. Tozer has kindly informed 

 me, it should have been written Vutanaria, that being the proper transliteration 

 of the Modern Greek ^ovravapla, a diver — from ^ovtI^u, mergo. 



